


Perfectly Executed Notches (and Near Misses)

by orphan_account



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Askbox Fic, F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-31
Updated: 2012-05-31
Packaged: 2017-11-06 10:50:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/418017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anon requested: "Swan Queen; Regina just can't seem to stay faithful to Emma. Multiple partners? Angst please?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Perfectly Executed Notches (and Near Misses)

She’s used to taking hearts by now. Less used to crushing them, but it’s always easier than she expects when she can’t see the last blaze of fire behind their eyes before it’s extinguished. The analogy is apt for this, for what she is doing now. It might be a less literal way to destroy someone, but it’s just a different brand of brutality, of an art that she has already mastered.

Number seven grunts beneath her. _It all comes down to the number seven._ She doesn’t know his name, of this life or the last. She never does. But they all know hers. It’s not like she has a choice, really, but she relishes it anyway: the risk, the fact that all they have to do is _say it_ and the tenuous balance that has been struck between Emma and herself could just give way beneath them.

Two through seven have all been men. It’s easier, of course, to find them willing. She had been trained for this very purpose from her first blushings of womanhood, an apprentice of seduction. She might have had her rebellions, but these are not skills one is wont to forget. She _knows_ men, knows the tricks that make them weak: the moment to let her gaze drop to their mouths, bite her own bottom lip, when to touch them—light, on the forearm at first—and they all play their parts in this little game exactly as they ought.

They are easier for other reasons, too.

Number one had been a woman she remembers faintly from Leopold’s court, but when stripped bare beneath Regina’s wandering hands, Regina had found herself unable to stop tracing the differences, both slight and considerable: breasts, larger; cheekbones, duller; eyes, a mix of hazel and green, not the piercing blue into which she had gazed one day and suddenly found herself accustomed. That time, she had found it was her own heart that clenched tightly in her chest, and _that_? Oh, that will not do at all.

(It is supposed to be Emma who gets scared when something between them takes root. But Emma isn’t going to run this time. Regina isn’t going to let that happen. The next time her life falls apart, it will be on her own terms.)


End file.
